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Google Street View Cameras: Now on Tricycles

After getting hounded out of town by outraged Brits wielding metaphorical pitchforks, burning torches and yelling “Not in my back yard!” the Google Street View team has turned to a lower-profile form of transport for its 3D camera arrays: Trikes.

The Google Street View tricycle will be arriving in Britain this summer (this year the summer in the UK is predicted to fall on a Tuesday in July). The real reason is not to avoid angry villagers (who seem curiously oblivious to the millions of CCTVs that watch them every day) but to gain access to places that cars can’t reach — in this case sports arenas, coastal paths and the like.

This is a splendid piece of lateral thinking. I live in a warren of very old, narrow streets in Barcelona and while the surrounding, car friendly parts of the barrio are already Street Viewed, our smaller alleyways are not. Saying that, the Street View Trikester should bring a heavy chain with him, or risk ending up yet another victim of the neighborhood’s bike stealing junkie.